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Brazilian rum or cachaça

In the United States cachaça is sold as Brazilian rum. In fact, cachaça and (Caribbean) rum are different alcoholic drinks. While rum is made from molasses, cachaça is made directly from sugarcane juice. Virtuoso Life, March/April 2010, offers a brief account of cachaça. It began as a drink for slaves, but now is the most popular alcoholic beverage in Brazil where it is the basis for caipirinha, the national cocktail. The magazine points out that cachaça is the world's third largest-selling spirit. It also will be a surprise to most of us that number one is Korea's soju, traditionally made from rice (and now made from all sorts of things). Not surprising is that number two is vodka, the basis for most Euro-American cocktails in our post-gin era.

Drinking Games, from Bolivia to Connecticut (article)

Michael Gladwell, "Drinking Games," New Yorker, Feb. 15, 2010. Thank you to Kevin Grace for the tip. The article recounts a research finding from the 1950s when Dwight Heath was a young anthropology graduate student at Yale. Both the Camba in Bolivia and Italian-Americans in New Haven, Connecticut, drank a good deal but did not display anti-social behavior. For an abstract of the article, see here.

New rum distillery in Newport, RI, once the rum capital of the world

A new rum distillery, named after a seventeenth-century Rhode Island pirate (Thomas Tew) has opened business in Newport, RI. In 1769 the Rhode Island city boasted 22 such rum distilleries. For more, see here.

Chocolate at Principe (article)

Xan Rice, "Life, Liberty and Fine Chocolate: An Italian Entrepreneur Pursues Simple Perfection on a Tropical Isle," Utne Reader, May-June 2009, pp. 53-56. Reprinted from New Statesman, January 15, 2009. Discusses Claudio Corallo who has a cocoa plantation on Principe, the twin isle of Sao Tome. Previously Corallo had grown coffee in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Zaire) and now grows coffee on Sao Tome. He now is thinking of making rum too.

Rum in Atlantic Canada until 1830 (dissertation in progress)

Emily Burton has begun work on a Dalhousie University doctoral dissertation on rum in Atlantic Canada from the early eighteenth century until about 1830. For details, see here. Thank you to David Trippel for his continued contributions to this blog.